Research firm says big data category will be worth $1.5 billion due to pilot projects

By Hamish Barwick

Computerworld Australia|January 24, 2012

Near field communications (NFC) and big data have been tipped by research firm, Deloitte, as two technologies that will see greater uptake in Australia during 2012.

According to its latest report, Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions 2012, big data would be worth up to $1.5 billion globally due to pilot projects in fields such as meteorology and physics simulations.

Deloitte Australia technology, media and telecommunications industry leader, Damien Tampling, said that although big data was in its infancy in Australia, it deserves a place in the overall enterprise IT strategy for generating business insight.

"In 2009, this industry was still very small but it is now growing due to data analytics. Even Deloitte has dabbled in it by creating divisions that focus on analytics," he said. "Fast followers [of big data] are likely to include the public sector, financial services, retail, entertainment and media industries."

Turning to NFC, Tampling forecasts that global shipments of smartphone devices equipped with NFC will grow from 90 million devices to 200 million. Deloitte estimates that 42,000 NFC readers will be rolled out to Australian retail merchant premises.

Tampling also pointed out the challenge Australia would face with NFC. "However, the challenge with Australia when it comes to NFC is going to be collaboration between banks and telco providers," he said.

"What will end up happening here is that we will see some more agile innovations in that payment space such as social media. For example, payment technologies could be developed that would allow people to tweet money to each other."

Other technology predictions are the spending on computers and software by Australian households by full year 2012 is estimated to be $5.44 billion, 80 per cent of the estimated $6.8 billion technology spending.

"In Australia we had a pretty average retail time over the Christmas period but if you look at the one category that is defying that trend, it is technology equipment," Tampling said. "People are going out and buying a smartphone or tablet using the money they might have spent on a new car or holiday."

In addition, more than 25 per cent of tablet sales are predicted to come from the business sector. Tampling said this was because businesses would start to allow employees to not only bring tablets into the workplace but pay for those devices and make it part of the standard hardware practice.

Tampling said Australia will see the rise of the multi-tablet owner with predictions that almost five per cent of tablets sold will be to consumers that already own one tablet.

"There are a few ramifications for that," he said. "One is that it will put more pressure on print media. Instead of having one tablet and keeping a newspaper subscription, this might drive them to just use tablets to view content."